Up, Up And Free To Play: Tribes: Ascend

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Tribes: Ascend is a game about leaping off a cliff, hitting your jetpack at exactly the right moment to build momentum, then skiing across the whole map while hurling explosive discs at equally zippy pursuers. Backwards. It’s also one of Those franchises. You know the ones I mean. The ones with an army of fans fueled by nostalgia and high-explosives, ready to set fire to anything that dares even think about taking the name of their beloved game in vain.

But is Ascend a brave new start for the series, or just so much free-to-play kindling? I pulled my jetpack out of storage and ventured into the Not-Quite-Closed Beta to find out…

Like most Tribes fans, the original game has a special place in my heart – specifically, just past the third aortic valve. It wasn’t my first online shooter, but it was the first my crappy internet connection let me really get into. “Come for the jetpacks,” I remember hearing it whisper. “Stay for the scale. Oh, and feel free to slip that Starsiege disc I came bundled with into the microwave. Nobody’s going to give a squitty little crap about that in a couple of months time.”

Playing Tribes: Ascend’s current maps and modes, I can safely say I don’t feel the kind of geek-rage that resulted in what our in-house therapist now calls “The Syndicate Incident”. That said, my memories of it are more a warm fuzzy cloud of “Wooo! Jetpacks!” and “This is actually playable on my rubbish modem!” than specifics of its balance system or map design. I played Tribes 2 for a bit, but not as much as the original. Most damningly in the eyes of the series’ fans, I even… gulp… enjoyed the much despised Tribes: Vengeance back in 2004, if only for the novelty of its neat character-swapping single-player campaign. (I know. I’m sorry.)

With all this in mind, here’s how things stand: Hi-Rez still has some way to go before launch if it wants Ascend to match its predecessors, but I’ve been enjoying it on both its own terms, and as a sequel – if not to the point of paying to unlock anything in its item store. As for how it compares to its upcoming semi-competitor Firefall, I have no idea. I’ve not played that one yet. They’re two very different games though, with Firefall embracing open-world action and PvE, and Tribes: Ascend sticking firmly to the series’ roots as a round-based team combat game.

If you want to get in on the Closed Beta, you have three basic routes – ask a friend who’s already in to give you a key, if they have one, find a site giving them away, or buy pre-order a £20/$30 copy for guaranteed admission, along with 3,000 futuristic funbucks to spend in-game and some other bits and pieces. Without paying up, you only get access to two of the 12 classes – Ranger and Soldier – and have to unlock the others with gold (520 for most right now) or playing roughly a billion rounds to earn enough in-game credit. On the plus side, anything you unlock will remain yours after launch, along with any ranks and progression in each class.

The problem with this approach is obvious. With only two classes as freebies, and only one of them wielding Tribes’ iconic Spinfusor gun, maps have a tendency to end up as Soldier-fests, with only a handful in the games I’ve played going for more situationally relevant ones like the mortar-hurling Juggernaut. Soldier is a perfectly good class, and buying the others absolutely no guarantee of victory, but the core Capture The Flag game, complete with vehicles and bases to defend, just isn’t the same without a wide spread of character classes around you.

It’s largely because of this that I’ve been drawn far more to the drop-in friendly Team Deathmatch mode instead. This gives both factions a stockpile of lives, with a 2X bonus for the team that holds the flag at any given time. This adds a sense of focus while not requiring anything in the way of team co-ordination – people naturally gravitate to the flag carrier, while engaging in impromptu high-speed duels over the blandly attractive terrain maps.

Every class gets its own load-out, with weapons ranging from sniper rifles to futuristic machine guns. For Soldiers though, Tribes continues to belong to the Spinfusor – which is odd, because it’s about the stupidest, most poorly conceived weapon in the history of everything. In fact, in any real world situation, even suggesting it be built would result in the creator being taken out and shot. In the Tribes-verse though, its introduction apparently went something like this…

“Sir! I’ve finished the new gun. I call it… the Spinfusor.”

“Excellent! With this, we shall finally crush the Diamond Sword! Or Blood Eagles! Whichever one we aren’t! Frankly, I can’t remember myself most of the time! Tell me, is it all I hoped for?”

“Uhhh. Maybe? It’s a spectacularly slow projectile designed for hitting enemies with jetpacks who are travelling at high speeds in three dimensions. For safety reasons, it also has very limited splash damage, and doesn’t even hurt all that much if you get hit in the face with it. Also, its ammo is so big and bulky, our Soldiers will only get a few shots from it.”

“I… see. Well, your death probably won’t be torturous, but…”

“Did I mention it fires those glowing blue disc things from Tron?”

“WE SHALL MAKE IT OUR SIGNATURE WEAPON!”

Luckily, being stupid as hell doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly fun to use. Hitting enemies from a distance requires incredible precision/good luck that can be put down to incredible precision, and the fact you usually have to get in two or three solid hits makes it all the more satisfying to win. Duels are huge, spiralling and chaotic, forcing you to stay off the ground as much as possible (since that makes you much more likely to be hit by splash damage) while still tracking and predicting enemy movement. A good kill is a thing of beauty, especially in the rare occasions you get to turn and pop someone right out of the air. This is known as a Blue Plate Special, and the pop-up notification when you get one is sweeter than any sack of bonus points.

Along with jetpacks and the Spinfusor, the defining Tribes mechanic is the ability to ski around levels at insanely fast speeds. Most spawn locations in the maps make a point of starting you on a hill to make it easy to get your speed up, as well as providing you with an at-a-glance view of where the action is happening and where your skills will be most appreciated.

To ski, you simply jump down and hold the spacebar to be freed from the evil bitch that is friction, making judicious use of your jetpack to fly up hills and leap over obstacles. Momentum is retained whichever direction you look in, making it easy possible to shoot pursuers if you’re holding a flag, or spin to strafe a flag-carrier as you both hurtle across the map. Grab it yourself, and you’re immediately thrust into a mix of Sonic the Hedgehog, Starship Troopers and playground tag – especially in Team Deathmatch, where the question isn’t whether you can hold onto it, but how long you can evade your pursuers before your luck runs out.

As with almost everything in Tribes, it takes time to get the hang of this – but that just makes it more meaningful to finally clamber up the competency curve and start scoring points. Those points also pay your way into the more advanced tools at your disposal, like buying vehicles and calling in an orbital strike from anywhere that gives you line-of-sight on the target.

The downside of the combat style is that it tends to distance you from your enemies, to the point that you don’t leap into battle against Infiltrators and Juggernauts so much as little red dots. Killing those little red dots feels good, but it’s a thrill destined to fade as you get more comfortable with the weapons and being awesome becomes less of an Event.

Original Tribes made up for this slight disconnect with its focus on team-play, though it still remains to be seen if enough people will stump up the cash/time to make that as enjoyable this time around. Tribes: Ascend’s use of a League of Legends style free-to-play model makes sense, but only having 12 classes to parcel out compared to that game’s 41,540,329 different champions seems like it could be a problem for a game designed around the assumption that people would just be able to jump in and play the different roles as required. There’s still time to fix that though, as well as adding other money-sinks like cosmetic character options, which could allow for more class choice up front if balance proves an issue after launch.

As for the pre-order option, it’s not a bad deal if you already know you’ll be playing Ascend. The gold will help unlock the majority of the classes for you up-front, as well as give you a handy booster pack that lets you unlock their individual talent trees considerably faster. These don’t seem to radically change your role, but give you upgrades you’ll want, like an extra 10 Spinfusor shots, or extra running speed, all paid for by experience won for winning games.

For the cost of it though, I’d advise trying to get a free closed beta code before committing yourself. It’s an enjoyable game, but one that’s definitely not going to appeal to everyone. There’ll be an open beta a bit closer to the game’s release in 2012, which will both hopefully have more maps, and have given early players plenty of time to unlock the other classes. That’s when we’ll really see how well Ascend lives up to the Tribes legacy, and if its world of jetpacks and flying discs can win over a whole new generation of Eagles and Sworders.

206 Comments

I’ve got a beta key as well, and hot DAMN I am having some major fun with this.
I’ve never been big into the competitive FPS scene (Bad internet connection as a kid), and faux-realistic stuff like CoD and BF just didn’t appeal to me.
This is my first Tribes game, and I am having massive fun just moving around the map at crazy speeds. That’s always a sign of a good game.

The kills are VERY satisfying to achieve (especially with the spinfusor), and tagging the flag is always exhilarating.
I already threw 8 bux their way, because I believe the game’s worth it. I can only hope it will trigger a change in the current FPS flavor of CoD-like games.

EDIT: Also, don’t be mean to the pistol! It’s a great weapon, especially for finishing people off, or simply pummeling lighter classes. That is, if you got enough accuracy to use it!

Oh come on, you can’t possibly have never picked up light armor and a blaster and taken down a juggernaut just because you could.

The piddliest little weapons are always the most satisfying. Like you said the spinfusor is poorly conceived and practical like an underground airport but that just makes it more fun, and the worst possible weapons have the same charm (but don’t shoot explosive discs).

Yeah, the pistol’s purpose really is being a “last resort”, to some extent. It’s a secondary weapon that’s intended to easily take away that last sliver of health from enemies quickly skiing away, and to keep enemies’ regeneration from kicking in during prolonged fights.

Don’t expect something like the Ranger’s grenade launcher, which is effectively its primary weapon, despite filling the secondary slot. (While its “primary” weapon is(/was? Don’t know, haven’t played the last patch, yet, which is supposed to reduce its accuracy) still vastly overpowered, due to rapid fire hitscan)

And I’d like to spinfuse some beta keys at you all, but I haven’t received a new batch yet.

Oh, and the spinfusor’s projectiles really aren’t that slow, they just have to travel tremendous absolute distances, making them seem relatively slow compared to the speed at which you normally traverse said distances. Though the community is trying to get Hi-Rez to add momentum inheritance to projectiles (and grenades), to make up for their seemingly lacking speed.

My brother threw me a beta key the other day. I’ve only had the chance to play a few rounds so far, but I’m loving this. Maybe I’m just easily impressed (I thought Tribes: Vengeance was pretty neat, too, and I miss the grappling hook for crazy jetpack cornering action), but this feels fast, open and full of room for player skill to really shine.

It’s nice to look out across a map and mentally plot an ideal skiing course from where you are, to where you want to go.

Great article, have been enjoying this quite a lot myself over the last few weeks.

I would suggest trying to get a beta key and then purchasing the cheapest gold option (800 gold was about £6.99 here) simply because making any purchase in the beta will get you lifetime VIP status (plus the bonus XP and tokens every game that come with it). I would certainly recommend picking up the pathfinder with the gold as well, great class.

Also on the topic of beta keys:

EDIT: All gone…more below

You will need to download the hi-command client from their website to redeem them.

I would love to have a chance to play at all. Got an beta invite and crashed on the brick wall of Hi-Command, HiRez’s all new Launcher that on some machines doesn’t install, on some its unable to properly download the client, and on some never gets past infinite “Loading” stage (this is my case). Tried every trick in the book provided by their CA team, support posts and player-made guides; to no effect.

Well, good thing I also got invited to the DOTA 2 Beta that WORKS for a change.

If you haven’t tried this already, download the HiCommand download on the main site (it might be in support somewhere.. I can’t remember) instead of the one it gives you when you say you want to download Tribes Ascend
The generic download doesn’t seem to run into this problem
I had two friends who ran into the same “Loading” problem as you
HiCommand does suck though, and I believe they’re working on a better launcher

Although there’s an obvious thematic similarity between Section 8 and Tribes, they could hardly play more differently. Section 8 is, for all intents and purposes, basically a standard first person shooter played on a larger battlefield with some nifty high-tech add-ons. Sure, you can sprint around pretty quick and jump a few stories high every so often, but it’s still a run-around-and-shoot game at its heart.

Tribes isn’t really like that. You can run if it tickles your fancy, but you’ll be easy pickings for the thirty guys flying over your head. Instead, the jetpack is your best friend and primary mode of transportation, allowing you to slide down hills and blast through the air at 150-200 KPH. Combat is fast and frenetic, a bit like a bunch of guys on Japanese superbikes trying to nail one another with baseballs. Overall, the game will make you think a first-person shooter had a drunken dalliance with a flight sim one night, and this is their bastard, mutant offspring.

…and good god is it fun.

It comes down to this: The battlefields in Tribes are probably a bit bigger than Section 8’s, but Tribes has no need for a burn-in spawn system because you can cross the map in 10 seconds once you’ve got skiing down.

The game is fun but unlocking things without paying will take ages.
I tried to pay for the cheapest booster pack (10 days) which is $8 or about 6 Euros and their system wouldn’t accept my prepaid Visa in any way.

A bit of a disappointment, since I’m not going to spend months trying to unlock classes the free way and I lost interest in the game altogether.

Pretty cool though, if I could get their payment system to work I’d definitely have kept playing it.

but i really enjoyed tribes and will again soon. i am new to the tribes franchise though. it’s pretty hard to learn the game but once you get the hang of it, it is so rewarding.

btw. only because firefall has jetpacks does not mean that both games have anything in common. in fact they don’t have anything in common other than the jetpacks that also work totally different in both games. nono, bad bad. never ever compare both games. i am actually in both betas. i can’t tell you anything else.

I never played the original Tribes, but I’m really enjoying Ascend. Shooting your pursuer’s knees with Spinfusor while skiing backwards at ridiculous speeds feels absolutely amazing.

The game still needs some work (no ****, it’s a beta!), but if they can fix some performance issues (FPS randomly capped to 30 on 2500K / 2×6950) and make the progression more appealing (not much to unlock and it’s extremely slow), I can see Tribes: Ascend getting really popular.

Richard: Have you really shot 3 solid spinfusor hits to enemies before they die? I’ve only played for a couple of hours, but usually direct hits kill enemies instantly and even the splash damage seems to take half the HP off from soldiers, if you hit right next to their feet.

Funny Zealuu mentions Section: Prejudice. Tribes sounds like Section 8 writ larger, with a more grandiose scale. And, hopefully, more varied maps and modes. Though Tribes does not have GFWL, which is always a plus.
.
I too am curious how they play from a comparison standpoint. Being more of a coop person myself, however, I am looking forward to finally playing Firefall more so than this, but to each their own.

I probably loved all the features in the original Tribes that were ultimately useless once a few good twitchy skiiers were on the server. Like targeting assist/laser guiding, hiding sensor extenders around the place and then using homing missile turrets to take out baddies clear across the map, general command screen bollox and of course vehicles.
Are any of those things still in there? Hard to tell some times.

Were you inputting them in the Hi-rez client? Downloadable here: link to tribesascend.com
I’ve heard of quite a few people trying to redeem them via Steam, goes to show how huge a piece of PC gaming it is.
I’ll have more keys just after 16:00 if you are still around.

Why on earth does the Spinfusor have to be manually reloaded by sticking the disc in by hand? The original one just queued another disc into the chamber on its own. Not only is the new animation dumber, it takes some of the coolness away from the weapon itself.

In Hi-command, if you have keys it’ll say “Beta Keys for Friends” or something similar in the list below the Play button. You normally need to be VIP to get keys I believe but sometimes standard beta players get a couple keys as well.

” roughly a billion rounds to earn enough in-game credit. ” This has been changed for the Pathfinder and Juggernaught. They are much cheaper now. Technicion and Infiltrator are both in range of about half a billion rounds. The rest is still 9600 Tokens afaik…

Do all beta testers get keys my Bro is in beta but hasn’t said anything bout free keys to me and I am stuck at work so I can’t use any of these. Also I hear they are being posted a lot in 4chan’s video game forums if some of you guys are too slow to get any of these :)

I’m feeling really torn here, I desperately want to spread the word and get fresh meat in the game but surely there are only a limited number of servers and I don’t want to be forever stuck in queues for ’em.

Argh! Why do the comments load so slowly! I can see some keys posted in the recent comments section to the right, but that doesn’t show the full key and they don’t come up here till in few minutes! THE PAIN!